Introduction: Early child development occurs within an interactive environment, initially dominated by parents or caregivers, and is heavily influenced by the dynamics of this social context. The current study probed the neurobiology of "family personality", or family functioning, in the context of parent-child dyadic interaction using a two-person neuroimaging modality.
Methods: One hundred and five parent-child dyads (child mean age 5 years 4 months) were recruited. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning was employed to measure neural synchrony while dyads completed a mildly stressful interactive task. Family functioning was measured through the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale IV (FACES-IV).
Results: Synchrony during stress was significantly greater than synchrony during both baseline and recovery conditions for all dyads. A significant interaction between neural synchrony in each task condition and familial balanced flexibility was found, such that higher levels of balanced flexibility were associated with greater changes in frontal cortex neural synchrony as dyads progressed through the three task conditions.
Discussion: Parent-child dyads from families who display heightened levels of balanced flexibility are also more flexible in their engagement of neural synchrony when shifting between social conditions. This is one of the first studies to utilize a two-person imaging modality to explore the links between family functioning and interbrain synchrony between parents and their children.
Objective: Research challenged the notion that neuroticism correlates with affective variability, suggesting that it may result from statistical artifacts due to the non-normal distribution of negative affect. We aim to advance this line of research by (a) introducing affect balance as a normally distributed measure of affective well-being and (b) examining current affect balance as a moderator of the relationship between neuroticism and affect balance variability.
Method: We meta-analyzed the results of 14 ambulatory assessment datasets (N = 2389 participants, N = 174,423 observations).
Results: We found that while the associations between the mean and affective variability were large for negative affect, they were much smaller for affect balance. Moreover, the association between neuroticism and variability in negative affect was very small, yet medium-sized for affect balance. Importantly, the latter association depended on current affect levels: Participants high relative to low in neuroticism showed stronger subsequent fluctuations in affect balance when currently feeling better than usual, but weaker subsequent fluctuations in (and thus more persistent) affect balance when currently feeling worse than usual.
Conclusion: Increased variability should not be seen as a bad sign but may be a sign that an affective system is changing, which may be adaptive or maladaptive for an individual, depending on the initial state of the system.
Objective: Several studies have analyzed the relationship between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and dark personality, but the results are inconclusive. One study tested correlations between traits that may underlie a person-centered profile of "dark EI." Our study aimed to replicate and extend that research, identifying profiles in Spaniards and examining the differences between the profiles based on different variables of interest.
Method: Two studies were designed, the first one (N = 1241) focused on trait EI and the Dark Triad, and the second one expanding the previous (N = 392) focusing on ability EI and the Dark Tetrad.
Results: Three profiles were obtained in both studies: nondark and non-EI profile, dark profile, and average narcissistic and high EI profile. The latter showed the highest self-esteem, strengths, well-being, and civic engagement, and the lowest psychological difficulties and personal distress.
Conclusions: Our results reinforced the findings of the study we replicated, not supporting the presence of dark EI, but also not supporting the presence of high EI with very low levels of dark traits. These results have implications when designing preventive actions to improve emotional education.